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Beijing's mayor Guo Jinlong said on Monday that the Chinese capital faces an "extremely serious" pollution problem, unveiling a target for "blue sky days" below the number achieved for all of 2009.

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After wrestling for years with Beijing's appalling traffic and pollution problems, city planners have come up with a distinctly old-fashioned solution: bicycles.

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Beijing will not extend its Olympics-time odd-even car restriction policy past its deadline of Sept. 20th, officials said this week, as the Paralympic Games drew to a close. Drivers will be "encouraged" instead to leave their car at home one day a week.

The return to Beijing's traffic- and smog-heavy status quo will mark the end of what may have been the world's largest pollution control experiment: a restriction on cars, factories and construction that lasted for two months and resulted in the clearest skies Beijing has seen in a decade and raised vehicle speeds 10 percent to 43 kph.

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Beijing's environmental authorities have instituted a bewildering array of measures in hopes of cutting pollution ahead of the 2008 Olympics. They're instituting traffic bans, shutting down factories and unleashing cloud seeders as part of the city's $17 billion anti-pollution regimen.

And yet, at least in terms of air quality, one veteran atmospheric chemist says that China's outsized efforts will have little to no impact on the air. Why? Because Beijing's worst air-quality days are often not the result of human activities, but meteorological phenomena -- namely, the lack of cold fronts pushing across the city from Mongolia.

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